


Here Because I'm Not All There

by theleaveswant



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Assassins & Hitmen, Backstory, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Bisexual Bucky Barnes, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Cold War, Death Threats, Dissociation, Drinking & Talking, F/M, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, New York City, One of My Favorites, Pain, Past Abuse, Past Brainwashing, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Past Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Past Relationship(s), Past Torture, Past Underage Sex, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Trauma, Rough Sex, Smoking, Spies & Secret Agents, Squatting, Strangulation, Surveillance, The Red Room, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-27
Updated: 2015-01-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 08:17:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3242699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/theleaveswant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She only catches the flash of a blade returning to its hiding place because she knows to look for it.</p><p>“I let the Americans call me Natasha now. They find it less threatening.” She holds the plastic shopping bag she's carrying up for his inspection. “I brought some things. Food. Soap.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here Because I'm Not All There

**Author's Note:**

> Trying to reconcile the possibility of Bucky & Natasha's Red Room path-crossing with the lack of acknowledgment of same in CA:TWS. Goes to some dark places--please ask if you would like a tag or personal alert for any particular themes/content.

She crosses the threshold slowly, without fanfare but with no real gestures towards stealth either. He already knows she's there and that she's alone, and this is the only ingress not barricaded or booby-trapped.

“Natalia,” he says, and it's not a greeting but a fact, proof of knowledge, though it's hard to say who he's proving it to.

She turns her head to look at him, casually leaning back against the wall next to the door. He seems smaller, with his hair tied back at the nape of his neck and his shoulders softened by the drooping sleeves of a moth-nibbled sweater that Thor would have found roomy. Time has chiseled deeper lines around his eyes. 

She only catches the flash of a blade returning to its hiding place because she knows to look for it.

“I let the Americans call me Natasha now. They find it less threatening.” She holds the plastic shopping bag she's carrying up for his inspection. “I brought some things. Food. Soap.”

He grunts. “Thanks,” he says, after she puts the bag down on the concrete floor. He follows her lead in speaking Fenya.

“Do you want to frisk me?” she asks, extending her arms away from her body. He pushes off from the wall into a natural resting stance—totally relaxed, totally neutral, and totally unpredictable.

“Should I?” A fair question, and a sincere one. Natasha raises her arms higher and turns a slow 360° to show him: not strapped. Doesn't necessarily mean unarmed, definitely doesn't mean safe, but it does suggest a willingness to fight fair. Good opportunity to grab a quick survey of the environment, too.

“Nice place. May I?” She moves deeper into the loft and he follows her, keeping a constant distance between them, and in the shifting blue-stained light filtering through the tarpaulin tacked up over the worst of the broken windows it's like they're wading on the bottom of the sea. He watches her look around as if it's the first time she's seen the place, and it is—the first time since he moved in.

There are rust patches on the floor, rust flakes caking on the I-beam girders holding up the water- and nicotine-stained ceiling, bricks falling out from between crumbling mortar, and drifts of thick oily dust, but for now it's dry, spacious, and secure. It's not technically a squat; a Stark Industries subsidiary bought up the block weeks ago and is waiting for permission from on high to move forward with their planned demolition and reconstruction, and the whole neighborhood's Big Brothered up the wazoo. She's not sure he knows any of that. If not, he'll piece it together easily enough—the scarcity of vermin and absence of territorial challenges are suspicious enough, the running water more so even if it is amber-yellow and delivered sputtering out of screeching pipes. Could be he's grateful enough for the solitude that he's letting it slide. 

Natasha spies a homey nest set up in one corner with a canister stove, a hand-crank lantern, and a good-quality sleeping bag on top of the mattress he dragged up from the street. Easy living compared to the conditions he's used to. “You like it here?”

He shrugs. “I'm sorry I shot you.”

Well. As good a place to start as any. “Which time?”

The corner of his mouth twitches, makes a break for smiling and almost gets there. She'll call that a victory. She smirks back and hallelujah, the smile breaks through. This is going better than she'd hoped.

“You got away.” He takes a few steps toward the windows, into hazy light like swimming toward the surface. Stops with his body angled so he can see her without looking at her.

“Defected.”

“I'm glad.” He pauses, opens his mouth to say something else and then shuts it again.

She closes in, quietly, restoring the distance he'd set before. “What?” she asks. She hadn't honestly expected him to just start talking, and she'll be damned if she lets him just stop.

He shakes his head with a scowl and paces away from her, circles around the far side of a vertical girder and leans his back against the flat of it.

She asks again. “What?”

“The first time I saw you . . . here.” He jerks his chin towards the window, indicating New York. He's silent long enough that she thinks he's lost the thread of his thought. “I had this vivid memory of your feet,” he pauses again to drop his gaze and splay his right hand across his chest, over his sternum, “here, of me holding your legs while I . . .” He allows a pause long enough to complete the implied sentence before lifting his face to look at her, nonplussed.

“That happened,” she assures him. As soon as he said it she'd remembered—biting down her whimpers as his cock battered that aching spot inside her cunt that she didn't then have a name for and his fingers bruised wherever he gripped her for leverage—and felt her pussy twinge with fond recollection.

He sighs with relief, then grimaces. “I'm sorry. Fuck. I shouldn't have brought it up.”

“Sorry, why?” She leaves a prudent body length between them when she moves toward him. “I'm not.”

His arms come up to cross in front of his ribs, right trapping left tight against his chest. “You were just a kid.”

“That didn't stop you for long.” She smiles crookedly, pretends it's a joke, but he groans and slides down the girder to the floor. His sweater snags and bunches on the pitted metal. “Hey,” she says, and plants her feet in front of him. “You didn't chose it either. If our situations were reversed I'd have done the exact same thing.”

He snorts. She puts herself at face level by dropping to a crouch but he's watching the floor. 

“I never blamed you.” Eye contact. “It's hardly the worst thing either of us has ever done.”

“I guess not.” He laughs bitterly. “God, look at this fucking mess.” 

He isn't talking about the room.

She picks idly at the inside seam on the knee of her jeans. “How's your memory?”

“Better, I think? I don't know. Stuff's coming back, there's fewer gaps, but what I've got can't all be true.”

Sounds familiar. “Like somebody jumbled a bunch of jigsaw puzzles together. Pieces wedged in where they almost fit.”

He nods and says, very quietly, “Some of it I wish had stayed away.”

“Like me?” Another non-joke; look, she's an imaginary comedian.

“No,” he tells her seriously. “The Red Room, yes, and if I had to lose you to lose it I would. But I'd hope you'd find a way back.”

She stops fidgeting. “Likewise.”

He almost smiles again; rubs his right palm on the leg of his pants then raises an imaginary glass. “To jumbled jigsaw puzzles.”

“If you want to drink to that we can; there's a bottle in the bag.”

He frowns. “You brought liquor to an amnesiac hobo?”

“It's antiseptic!” She stands up to retrieve the bottle of cheap, terrible vodka.

“I don't have any cups,” he raises his voice over the plastic bag’s rustling.

She rolls her eyes and returns to her spot on the floor. “What, are you afraid I'm going to give you mono?” Sitting cross-legged with the bottle on the floor in front of her she pushes up her sleeves and turns her hands to show him she's not hiding anything before she cracks the seal and toasts. “To mess,” she says, and swigs.

They're too far apart to pass the bottle unless one or both of them transgress the invisible line of relative safety, so she screws the cap back on and sends the vodka rolling across the floor toward him. He catches it with his left hand. “To defects,” he says, in English.

She switches to English to match him. “Nice one.” 

He shrugs and rolls the bottle back. 

“To keeping a sense of humor.”

She returns the serve more aggressively this time but the bottle hits a bump and spins wide. He laughs as he leans out of his seat at the foot of the girder to grab it, winding up a few hand-spans closer to her than he'd been before.

He stares at the bottle for a moment, considering it, passing it back and forth between his skin and metal hands. She remembers vividly how each one felt when he touched her, and how long it was before he let her touch the metal one at all. He raises the bottle. 

“To waking up again.” Drink and return.

Natasha unscrews the cap and raises the mouth to her own. “You know I'm not a kid anymore,” she says, and tips it back.

“I noticed,” he says with a pointed glance. “You filled out nice.”

She holds the bottle out to him this time instead of rolling it, and he hesitates before rising onto his knees and reaching for it. She stretches to meet him, holds the bottle steady at the full extension of her arm and keeps gripping it long enough after his fingers clasp the other end for him to feel the resistant pull. He watches her as he drinks and afterwards he licks his lips.

She slides a little closer to him.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Taking a calculated risk. Are you okay with this?”

“Define 'okay'.” His gaze is skimming over her body now, tracking all the moving parts.

“Do you want me to keep going?”

He answers by shifting closer. There's a wary tension around his eyes but his lips part and his breathing deepens as she keeps shaving down the distance between their bodies until she can feel the heat rolling off his body. He doesn't smell that great, honestly, ripe and musty on top of the usual bitter machine oil, like he's due for a bath and the sweater's due for cremation, but she's faced significantly worse.

“This isn't why I came here,” she tells him when they're almost nose-to-nose.

“This isn't why I let you in.”

The kiss starts out gentle, cautious, testing—in all regards entirely unlike any kiss they'd shared before. Then his right hand curls around her arm and squeezes, and hers snakes around his ribs to pull him closer, and they're back to the familiar tug of war, pulling at one another with hands and mouths, ceding ground here in order to seize it there.

She grabs the knot of hair at the back of his head and twists. He hisses and grabs her ass with his left hand, easily scooping her up off the ground with him as he stands. She rolls with it, hiking her thighs up around his hips and holding on while he turns around. She smells the bitter tang of the girder before her back hits the flat face of it, shaking chips of loose rust free to land in her like-colored hair and on the shoulders of her jacket.

His right hand pushes the hair out of her face, then drops to shove under the hem of her henley shirt, hiking it up over her tit to bare her bra. He lifts her higher, keeps her pinned against the girder while he ducks his head to nip at the slash of exposed skin across the top of her breast. She pushes at his shoulders to feel him push back, tugs at his hair again until his right hand snaps up to grab her wrist and hold it out away from their bodies, stretching her arm as far as it goes—then he yelps and jerks back, leaving Natasha to land on her feet, startled and blinking.

“Mother _fucker_ ,” he growls, cradling his left arm to his chest and looking angry.

“Pain spike?” she asks.

He nods and blows out a shaking breath. Natasha sighs, brushes the rust flakes from her shoulders and starts combing them out of her hair with her fingers. He releases the clenched hand and shakes it, and turns to walk towards the windows.

“How often has it been shorting?”

“More the longer I’m out of cryo.” He pulls himself up easily onto the waist-high ledge and reaches in his back pocket for a lighter and a pack of cigarettes before settling down with his knees tucked up, perpendicular to the window.

The arm perceives mechanical forces: pressure, velocity, acceleration. It can't feel texture, or temperature, or pain, except when something misfires and overloads all the nerves they wired it into with a sensation he compared to flash-freezing. 

She hesitates before saying this, wary over how he'll receive it: “I know a few people who might be able to help with that.”

He laughs as the cigarette catches and expels the first draw of smoke in a derisive stream. “Who, Stark Jr.?”

“He's not his father.”

“No, I know. This one conducts dangerous experiments on himself _before_ rounding up slum kids with more balls than brains. Of course I heard he only got into that after feeding off wars came back to bite him and he had to, but hey, everybody's gotta start somewhere.”

“So not him, then.” She joins him at the window and glances down through the streaked and dingy pane. “Stark's not the only name in neurosynthetic interfaces these days, much as it might pain him to admit it.”

He grunts and parks the cigarette between his lips so he can stick his hand down the stretched-out neck of his sweater to prod at the seam.

“Steve hasn't seen that yet, has he?”

“Nope.”

“Do you plan to show him?”

He flicks ash through a hole in the glass and chews on his lip as he watches it blow away. She watches him watch.

The window ledge is about the right height on her, so she sets her stance to start running barre exercises.

“That was fucked up, wasn't it?” he says after a few minutes tracking her movements. “The way they'd throw us in a room together and call it a treat for me and a—what, for you? A deterrent? An object lesson?”

“Yeah,” she agrees. “That was fucked up.” She lowers her arm and looks at him. “But we gave them the show they wanted, and between us . . . That felt like getting some of our own back, to me.”

His forehead crinkles as smoke flows out his nostrils. “Was it just for them? The show, I mean.”

“Even I'm not that good a liar.” He raises a dubious eyebrow. She smirks. “All right, I am. But I never faked anything with you.”

He makes a 'huh' sound. “And are you currently not faking anything with anyone else?”

“Not this week.”

“Not even Steve?”

She shrugs with her eyebrows. “That's complicated.”

He nods, stubs out the cigarette, and looks at the butt for a moment before tossing it out the window.

“What about you?”

He picks up his lighter and sparks it, waves his metal fingers back and forth through the flame. “What about me what?”

“What about you and Steve.”

“ _That's_ complicated.” He kills the flame and wipes the film of soot on his fingers on his sweater, then jerks his head towards the girder. “He won't mind if you leave here covered in bite marks?”

“He won't mind finding out you put them there?” She cocks her head. “I'm pretty sure he won't like learning that it's not the first time.”

“That answers my next question.” He turns to swing his legs down off the ledge, looking into the room.

She puts her back to the ledge so they face the same direction. “A guess at the next-next one. . . Why haven't I told him?”

“Top of the class.”

“First it wasn't relevant. There was no way to use the information to my advantage; why disclose it? I knew Steve finding out who you were would destroy him, I didn't want that. Then when it happened. . . It was all complicated enough; I couldn't imagine telling him about that would make any of it better.”

He scuffs his heel against the wall below the window. “But you knew the whole time, didn't you? Who I was, to him and to you?”

“I knew who you used to be; I had no reason to expect that's who you were. You remember, this wasn't the first time we traded bullets.” He tips his head to concede the point. “You were on a mission, I was part of the objective. Even if you knew me, and from the way you fought me you clearly didn’t, there was nothing any of us could do to change that.”

“Or so you believed.”

“Or so I believed.” She laughs darkly. “I guess that says something about the impressions each of us made on you.”

“Steve has an annoying habit of doing things he doesn't know are impossible.” Not an outright refutation, but she wasn't really looking for one. “Do you want to tell him?”

“Not especially.” She can imagine how well that'd go over: remember all that stuff about trusting each other and me not having any more secrets? Well, the thing is . . .

“Do you want me to tell him?”

She shakes her head. “I don't know. I'd have to think about it.” She doesn't want to think about it. “You got any places you need to be today?”

He snorts.

She undoes the top button on the placket of her shirt. He makes a sound of understanding and appreciation. Her fingers slide down to the next one. He tsks and drops off the window ledge onto his feet. She pops that button and moves on to the next and before she gets there he grabs her wrists, turns her around, and pushes her up against the ledge.

He traps both her wrists in his left hand with his index finger between them and pulls them down, forcing her to arch her back and lean into him while his more dexterous fingers plunge down the front of her pants to rub her lips through her underwear. He leans over her shoulder to watch, practically gift-wrapping the opportunity to bite his earlobe. He grunts and lets her go, stepping away from her with a shove.

They take a moment to circle and size each other up.

“That sweater smells like death and old milk,” she tells him, and he sketches a mocking bow before peeling it off over his head. Underneath it he's wearing a once-white sleeveless shirt with a trail of stiff brown spots done the front. She wants to ask him whose blood that is but files the question away instead, flagging it as important, not urgent.

“Any other requests?” he asks.

She strips off her jacket and drops it on the floor. “Lose the knives?” 

He hesitates before producing three knives—two she’d spotted and one she hadn’t—from various hiding places about his person and lining them up on the ledge. “Ready now?”

“When you are.”

“You’re going to have some bruises.”

“So are you.” They just won’t last as long.

He strikes fast but he telegraphs the move so dodging is easy. Redirecting the force of the strike to get him to the floor is more challenging—he's so fucking strong that manipulating him when he's in motion takes effort, even if he's not trying to resist—but she does it, knocking him onto his back and dropping to straddle his hips.

“You're not even trying to make this hard for me,” she scolds as she pushes his undershirt up to bare his abs.

“I'm supposed to have to try?” He grins and grinds his pelvis up against hers. She rolls her eyes. “Kiss me.”

He uses her curling forward to press her lips to his to flip them both over so that he's kneeling between her legs. A tug at her belt loops yanks her hips higher up on his lap and scrapes her shoulders on the concrete floor, the way he used to scrape them over the rough wool blanket back in her cell in Russia. He reaches for her fly and she reaches for his chest, her hands skimming over shirt and skin out towards his shoulders. Her fingers brush the hard ridge of scar tissue ringing the join between metal and flesh and he stills.

“This isn't right,” he mutters.

“What's not right?” she asks.

“What is this?” he says, practically snarls, in clean Moscow-dialect Russian. “Who sent you?”

She frowns. “Nobody sent me. I came on my own.”

“Who sent you?” he asks again. She starts to shake her head and his metal hand closes, loosely, around her throat. “Who are you working for?”

“Nobody. I don't work for anybody anymore.” His fingers twitch against the sides of her neck, not a squeeze but a reminder of the ease with which he could snap her spine or crush her windpipe.

“This isn't right. This isn't right, you can't be here.”

“Bucky, what's hap—” His hand clamps tighter around her throat. She can't breathe.

“She didn’t call me that. I never told her that name.”

She can't breathe. Her fingers come up to claw at his hand. He's strangling her and she can't breathe. Her vision's starting to fuzz around the edges when he lets up enough for her to gasp and cough, and she lets go of his wrist. “I don't understand why you're doing this. Please tell me what's going on!”

“Tell your handlers I'll rip your head off if they come in here. Tell them.”

“I don't have any handlers, James. I swear, I came alone.”

“What is this?” he asks. “What are you after?”

“I don't—”

“Black Widow.” He presses his fingertips in from the side, aiming to hurt, not suffocate her. “What's the play? They know everything already, there's nothing left to spill. Is this just torture for the love of it?”

“I don't work for them anymore. Neither do you. We got away!”

“Bullshit.”

“I defected, remember? And Steve—”

“Don't talk about Steve. Steve's dead. You don't know about Steve.”

“He's not. I know him. He survived the same way you did.” 

His fingers loosen incrementally. “You're lying. That's impossible.”

“Exactly,” she says, and tries to smile. “That's how you know it's true.”

He hesitates. 

“Look out through that window there.”

Tighter again. “And give whoever's out there a clean shot?” She hopes she lives long enough to lie about the marks he’s leaving.

“I swear there's nobody out there.” She raises a hand to point. “There's a building. Avengers Tower. Just a couple of kilometers that way. That's where Steve's living. You can go and talk to him.”

He bites his lip and shakes his head. “I don't believe you.”

“There's a phone in my jacket pocket. Call him.”

The jacket's too far to reach with his free hand without letting go of her, but he manages to stick his leg out far enough to hook it with his toe and drag it closer. He fishes in the pocket and grunts. “Unlock it,” he tells her, thrusting the phone in her face.

It’s a little awkward, using the phone while he’s holding on to it and her, but after a couple of slips she pulls Steve’s number and taps for a voice call. “It’s ringing.”

To her profound relief, he answers almost instantly. His voice comes out quiet and scratchy and she fumbles to raise the volume. “Hey, Natasha, what’s up?” 

“Steve, where are you?” Projecting for the distant microphone is hard on her throat.

“I’m at home, at the apartment. What’s going on?” The distraction and mild confusion of his first utterance flare into piercing concern. “Nat?”

“Steve?” The name emerges tiny and unsteady and with it the boiling anger starts draining away from Bucky’s face.

“Bucky, where—?! Are you all right? Where’s Natasha?”

Bucky lifts the phone closer to his ear but doesn’t put it right to his head, holding it about a hand’s length away while he listens.

“Tell me what happened. Are you in danger? Buck? Somebody, say something!”

Natasha gulps air when the grip releases and his hand slides back onto her breastbone, pressing with a hair more force than necessary to hold her still. Pinned to the floor and breathing with difficulty is better than not breathing at all. 

“What city?” Bucky whispers.

“Um.” Steve hesitates, disconcerted. “New York. Manhattan. Just—hang on, I’m on my way.”

Bucky sits back on his heels. His right hand drops to his side and the phone slides from his grip while the left skims over her retreating body, making no move to thwart her scrabbling backwards with her hands and feet. “I’m sorry,” he says.

Natasha pushes up to a crouch, ready to bolt if he comes after her again. His eyes drift slowly up to hers and he shakes his head. “I’m sorry.” He blinks and a tear rolls down his cheek. “Natalia . . .”

She stares at him, sucking deep, cautious breaths around a lump of steel wool. Hesitantly, slow as a glacier, her hand floats out and she reaches towards him. He gasps, a shuddering thing, and drops his tear-stained face to the gritty floor. “I’m sorry.”

He flinches when her fingers brush his bare skin shoulder and his head comes up to see her kneeling on the floor in front of him. “Shh,” she murmurs, and winces. “I’ll be all right.”

He inches forward and she does her best not to twitch away from him. He crawls to her on his elbows. She raises her arm to make room for him to rest his head on her thigh, curled on his left side in the grime.

“I shouldn’t have done that.”

Natasha’s not going to argue with that, but she can stroke his exposed shoulder while he settles. He sighs.

She swallows, clearing her throat to let the words out. “It took me years to sort out the bad jigsaw pieces. I still don’t trust that I’ve found them all.”

“Natalia . . .” His right arm bends so his hand can reach hers. Rough fingertips brush lightly on her wrist. “I hate knowing that I hurt you.”

They're sitting just like that when Steve shows up, looking anxious and slightly winded, like maybe he just ran straight there. His stride slows as he crosses the room towards them, taking in the scene, their position and state of general disarray. He stops a couple of meters short. “Natasha?” he asks.

Reluctantly she meets Steve's eyes. “There's something I wish I'd told you earlier.”


End file.
